The Greenhouse provides nutritious, organic food to our patients and communities, but it also reduces hospital food costs

Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital had a vision to be a national model for wellness education, improve health and reduce health care costs by providing people with resources to help them improve and maintain optimal health. The Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital Greenhouse is part of making that vision a reality.

The new Greenhouse is full of organic fruits and vegetables which are used in patient meals, the Henry café and are sold at the hospital’s weekly seasonal farmers’ market. Some of the organic items being grown hydroponically (growing plants in water instead of soil), include:

20 varieties of heirloom tomatoes
Microgreens (requested by the hospital’s chefs)
Organic produce (fruits and vegetables) and herbs for patients, including lettuce, peppers, eggplant, cucumber, peas, beans, strawberries, Swiss chard and Chinese cabbage
Specialty greens

Yearly Estimated Production

The Greenhouse provides nutritious, organic food to our patients and communities, but it also reduces hospital food costs, including the estimated production of:

15,000 heads of lettuce per year, reseeded weekly: Projected value: […]

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Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback should be coasting to re-election this fall. The soft-spoken son of a Kansas pig farmer is the conservative governor of a deep red state, and he’s running in a year when Republicans will likely have a national advantage over Democrats. Instead, Brownback is now fighting for political survival in what his detractors call the theocratic dictatorship of ‘Brownbackistan.”

If Brownbackistan were running surpluses with essential services humming along, the governor would probably be fending off rumors of a 2016 presidential run. Instead, he is locked in a tight race with the House Minority Leader Paul Davis, who led Brownback by 6 points in a recent SurveyUSA poll and has been endorsed by more than 100 current and former Republican officials. Last week, the Cook Political Report moved the November contest from a likely Republican win to a pure toss-up.

Wint Winter, a former state senator who has known Brownback since he was 14, is one of the Republicans backing Davis.

‘I had hoped that it wouldn’t be as extreme as it’s been,” Winter told The Daily Beast of Brownback’s tenure. ‘I knew from Sam’s time in the Senate that he had a passionate affection for social issues, but […]

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Mississippi has proved to us all that austerity, or the political ideology of ‘government living within its means,” is a farce. All austerity means is taking money away from public services, and giving it to private business. Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant and the GOP-led legislature illustrated that perfectly in two ways.

Since 2008, Mississippi has violated a constitutional mandate to adequately fund the state’s public K-12 schools. The Mississippi Adequate Education Program, or MAEP, was established in 1997 to make sure a proper portion of taxes went to fund schools. A community’s ad valorem taxes will cover up to 27 percent of the cost, while the state covers the rest. The state’s contribution is essentially the base student cost times the daily attendance in a certain school district. The mandated amount would be readjusted every five years for inflation. Mississippi has spent $648 less per student than it did in 2008. Currently, Mississippi has underfunded its public schools by at least $1.3 billion.

In May of last year, the United Auto Workers released a study showing that Nissan’s Canton, Mississippi, plant was getting $1.33 billion in tax breaks from the state in return for Nissan’s promise to provide Mississippians with good-paying, full-time […]

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Just a week after a nonprofit revealed that the U.S. is lagging behind other developed countries in energy efficiency, a research firm’s data shows that the nation is the leader in denying climate change.

With more and more denial earning time on TV and in Washington, it’s not all that surprising. Still, it’s sobering to see visual data of Americans’ attitudes toward climate change compared to other countries.

The data comes from United Kingdom-based Ipsos MORI, as part of the company’s Global Trends study, which polled 16,000 people in 20 countries. The respondents were asked 200 questions about eight topics, including the environment.

The above graph shows that the U.S. had the fewest amount of respondents agree that climate change is largely a result of human activity. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of respondents from Argentina, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey believe that humans are mostly responsible.

Of the eight questions regarding the environment, two others also gauge climate denial. The U.S. leads or ties for first when it comes to the answer the is most closely related to climate denial. When viewing the graphs on Ipsos MORI’s report page, hovering over the graph provides an exact percentage of how respondents answered.

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